habitual among civilized women, that until recent years it was commonly supposed that there is a real and fundamental difference in breathing between men and women, that women’s breathing is thoracic and men’s abdominal.  It is now known that under natural and healthy conditions there is no such difference, but that men and women breathe in a precisely identical manner.  The corset may thus be regarded as the chief instrument of sexual allurement which the armory of costume supplies to a woman, for it furnishes her with a method of heightening at once her two chief sexual secondary characters, the bosom above, the hips and buttocks below.  We cannot be surprised that all the scientific evidence in the world of the evil of the corset is powerless not merely to cause its abolition, but even to secure the general adoption of its comparatively harmless modifications.

Several books have been written on the history of the corset.  Leoty (Le Corset a travers les Ages, 1893) accepts Bouvier’s division of the phases through which the corset has passed:  (1) the bands, or fasciae, of Greek and Roman ladies; (2) period of transition during greater part of middle ages, classic traditions still subsisting; (3) end of middle ages and beginning of Renaissance, when tight bodices were worn; (4) the period of whalebone bodices, from middle of sixteenth to end of eighteenth centuries; (5) the period of the modern corset.  We hear of embroidered girdles in Homer.  Even in Rome, however, the fasciae were not in general use, and were chiefly employed either to support the breasts or to compress their excessive development, and then called mamillare.  The zona was a girdle, worn usually round the hips, especially by young girls.  The modern corset is a combination of the fascia and the zona.  It was at the end of the fourteenth century that Isabeau of Bavaria introduced the custom of showing the breasts uncovered, and the word “corset” was then used for the first time.

Stratz, in his Frauenkleidung (pp. 366 et seq.), and in his Schoenheit des Weiblichen Koerpers, Chapters VIII, X, and XVI, also deals with the corset, and illustrates the results of compression on the body.  For a summary of the evidence concerning the difference of respiration in man and woman, its causes and results, see Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, fourth edition, 1904, pp. 228-244.  With reference to the probable influence of the corset and unsuitable clothing generally during early life in impeding the development of the mammary glands, causing inability to suckle properly, and thus increasing infant mortality, see especially a paper by Professor Bollinger (Correspondenz-blatt Deutsch.  Gesell.  Anthropologie, October, 1899).

The compression caused by the corset, it must be added, is not usually realized or known by those who wear it.  Thus, Rushton Parker and Hugh Smith found, in two independent series of